The timing seems right—Wednesday, Oct. 2, a week since Hurricane Helene pushed some four feet of seawater across these barrier islands, a day after local officials reopened bridges over the Intracoastal. As we walk, a smattering of storms are coalescing around the Gulf of Mexico. One will become Hurricane Milton and draw us into its cone, but that’s days away, so no worries, not yet. Let’s just walk and see what we see.
Bring water, my friend, irony be damned. It’ll hit 93 Fahrenheit again today, more than eight degrees above average here. Better than Phoenix, which will set a new daily record at 113, the hottest in the city’s history. Fort Myers will set a heat record today, too, at 94—same as San Francisco. Remember when October meant sweater weather?
Let’s take the byway across and meet Clearwater Beach at the traffic circle, which has been scraped almost clean of the hundreds of tons of sand Helene spread. Dozers plowed it aside, so S Gulfview Boulevard is a sand canyon now.
Like the more than 300,000 people who moved to Florida last year, the sand isn’t local. Calling it renourishment, we pay to have it shipped in every six years. With more hurricanes pounding the coasts—like Idalia last year, and Ian the year before—keeping the sand on the beach is getting harder and more expensive.
Like housing around here, sand, it turns out, is in short supply. A 2022 UN report notes that global demand for “sand resources” has tripled in the past 20 years, to around 100 trillion pounds a year—roughly 35 pounds per human per day. Much of it goes to building—adding landmass to coastal cities, and also for cement used to build roads and bridges, like the six-lane byway we just crossed. We shore up what increasingly violent nature tries to tear down.
So intense is the hunger for sand, Ed Conway writes in “Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization,” that an illicit trade has sprung up, with so-called sand mafias bribing cops and politicians and killing civilians. Pinellas County sources its sand from sand mines and bay bottoms, so you might never see the dark side.
Look there, on the ground near the four-star JW Marriott Clearwater Beach Resort and Spa: a dead seahorse. This is the first I’ve seen outside the Florida Aquarium. Researchers say a local population is clustered in seagrass beds around Egmont Key, the island in the mouth of Tampa Bay that’s disappearing by the day because of sea-level rise.
At barely 200 acres, it’s half the size it was 70 years ago—our canary in the coal mine.
My friend Jack lives there. He’s a Tampa Bay harbor pilot, guiding the big ships to port. The walls of his lovely old stilt home hold black-and-white photos of the neighborhood that used to occupy the key. The vast majority of those homes are long gone.
Jack’s house was buckled by Helene, water nearly to the doorknobs. Last I heard he didn’t plan to salvage it.
What’s the use now, when it’s just a matter of time before it happens again?
But sea level rise is boring. Unlike the air assault of a head-on hurricane, sea level rise takes a lifetime to notice. Even so, it’s at the center of the picture of climate change. And we’ve all gotten comfortable with the idea that it’s just a thing that will happen.
The water around Tampa Bay has risen by more than seven inches since 1950, increasing high-tide flooding five fold, and it’ll rise much faster in the next 30 years. The physics are easy to understand. Warming ocean water expands, pushing the water level up. It also melts the ice sheets at the poles, which contribute more global water. And as that water from the northern ice sheets enter the Atlantic, it slows down currents like the Gulf Stream—a measurable occurrence—causing water to pool differently in places like the Gulf of Mexico.
These three interrelated events have compelled scientists, academics and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to predict that sea levels are likely to jump another 10-12 inches in the next 30 years, much faster than they’ve risen over the last century.
This should make you uncomfortable. If it doesn’t, if you’ve already come to accept and expect the inevitability, maybe this will: the scale of devastation the rising seas will unleash will be something like extended nuclear war.
“Unlike the air assault of a head-on hurricane, sea level rise takes a lifetime to notice.”
We were warned. Time and again we were warned.
We were warned in 1953—71 years ago, the first mention of “global warming” I could find in an American newspaper—when the New York Times reported that “industrialized, urbanized man has poured unprecedented quantities of carbon dioxide” into the atmosphere, causing the planet to heat up. No longer could New Yorkers ride in a horse-drawn buggy across the Hudson River in wintertime.
We were warned in 1969, when United Press reported that our carbon emissions would “destroy life in the oceans and alter the earth’s climate by raising temperatures.” Climatologists back then said we had just a few decades to act. The headline in newspapers across the country was, literally, “Scientists warn human race.” Boomers kept booming.
We were warned in 1979, when the World Climate Conference told us that the poles were melting. “There is a real possibility that some people now in their infancy will live to a time when the ice at the North Pole will have melted, a change that would cause swift and perhaps catastrophic changes in climate,” the story opened. I celebrated my first birthday that January. I am now 46.
Rachel Carson warned us in “Silent Spring.” Al Gore warned us in “An Inconvenient Truth.” Elizabeth Kolbert warned us in “The Sixth Extinction.”
We were warned. We were indifferent.
We went on driving. We went on eating meat. We went on clear cutting forests and burning fuel.
We left our motors running while we waited in long lines in front of schools to pick up the children, and now they will live with the consequences, our severe thunderstorms and hurricanes and encroaching coastlines.
The best of us made adjustments. The worst of us said it was all bullshit.
Let’s keep walking.
Over Clearwater Pass, the sandhills give way to the trash canyons of affluent Belleair Beach and Belleair Shore. So much stuff, nice stuff, stacked on the curbs. These are fresh piles, not yet picked through or picked up. Much of it is serviceable utilitarian stuff like leather chairs, table lamps, wicker baskets, and it makes you wonder when we became so superabundant. In his book “So Much Stuff: How Humans Discovered Tools, Invented Meaning, and Made More of Everything,” archaeologist Chip Colwell quotes an estimate that the average American household possesses 300,000 things—so many belongings that we pay to keep piles of it in storage units.
You can’t help but think about wealth here. The homes are huge. A few of them have already been completely cleaned, as if the hurricane never happened. Hard not to wonder what material progress these folks contributed to build here, and why here, given the ever-encroaching shoreline. Are we simply enamored with Atlantis?
It stands to reason that no place is a “climate haven” anymore, like poor Asheville learned, but maybe the Montana mountains would be a more secure place to store valuables. At least the insurance might be more reasonable.
What is the cost of it all, anyways? What is the trade-off? How long before the shambled insurance market in Florida breaks once and for all? We can actually get close to an answer now when it comes to changing climate.
Every degree Celsius of warming costs a temperate country, like the United States, about one percentage point of Gross Domestic Product, David Wallace-Wells reports in “The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming.” The world would be $20 trillion richer at 1.5 degrees than at two degrees warmer. “Turn the dial up another degree or two and the costs balloon—the compound interest of environmental catastrophe,” Wallace-Wells writes. “3.7 degrees of warming would produce $551 trillion in damages.” Total worldwide wealth today is around $454 trillion.
Five years ago, the Union of Concerned Scientists found that nearly 311,000 homes in the United States—one in every eight in Florida—would be at risk of chronic water inundation by 2045, a timespan no longer than a mortgage. By 2100, the number would be more than 2.4 million properties underwater.
How and why we continue to insure some homes is beyond me. Some of my smart friends who saw Tampa’s Davis Islands underwater last week think that the very idea of disaster insurance is unsustainable.
Anyhow, that’s all money. The human toll is horrifying. A team writing in the journal Nature Climate Change puts 150 million lives—or 25 Holocausts—in that same half-degree gap, between 1.5 degrees and two degrees Celsius. Unless we make dramatic changes, our children will bury these dead.
Dramatic change seems distant as we walk past the burned out husk of a Tesla, which presumably caught fire during the flood.
“Three quarters of a century since global warming was first recognized as a problem, we have made no meaningful adjustment to our production or consumption of energy to account for it and protect ourselves,” Wallace-Wells writes. “If the next thirty years of industrial activity trace the same arc upward as the last thirty years have, whole regions will become unlivable by any standard we have today as soon as the end of the century.”
That was five years ago.
Walks are supposed to make you feel good, but today is different. Maybe it’s the crazy number of police SUVs cruising up and down still-sandy Gulf Boulevard. Maybe it’s the rats that scurry from trash piles as we pass. Maybe it’s the “YOU LOOT WE SHOOT” sign someone leaned up against a pile of waterlogged homegoods.
Maybe it’s the heat right now, or the fact that we just read that it’s a law of physics that for every degree Celsius increase in temperature, air is able to hold seven percent more water vapor—meaning heavier rainfall and bigger, stronger hurricanes.
WFLA Chief Meteorologist Jeff Berardelli reported last month that this was the most oppressive summer on record in Tampa; 90 days with a heat index of 100 degrees Fahrenheit or higher, beating 88 days in last year.
Whatever it is, I’m losing hope. Let’s hop over to what’s left of the beach.
Hurricanes have a way of redistributing our stuff, and here we find it, much of it made from plastic and half-buried now in imported sand. Scattered among the dead blowfish and stone crabs and rotting, putrid pen shells are recycling bins, water pistols, kayaks, mini fridges, a sleeper sofa. An unopened eight-pack of waterlogged Bounty paper towels.
Snowy plovers dart into the surf around a window-unit air conditioner, which brings to mind Dr. John Gorrie, who was a physician treating yellow fever patients in Apalachicola in the middle of the 19th century. “Nature would terminate the fevers by changing the seasons,” he is reported to have said, and he laid the groundwork for modern air conditioning, that double-edged sword.
Heat death sounds terrible. It starts with dehydration. Your skin gets red as your body sends blood outward. Internal organs begin to fail. You stop sweating. You get confused and combative. Then comes the lethal heart attack.
We would not live here without air conditioning, but ACs and fans now account for 10% of global electricity consumption. Wallace-Wells reports that demand is expected to triple, or perhaps quadruple, by 2050. “According to one estimate, the world will be adding 700 million AC units by just 2030,” he writes.
The terrible trade-off is that by making the inside cooler and more comfortable, we make the outside even hotter. When the thermostat is set to 69, it’s easy to forget what we’re doing.
“Someday, perhaps not long from now, the inhabitants of a hotter, more dangerous, and biologically diminished planet than the one on which I lived, may wonder what you and I were thinking or whether we thought at all,” William T. Vollmann writes in “No Immediate Danger,” the first book in his “Carbon Ideologies” series. “Of course, we did it to ourselves. We had always been intellectually lazy, and the less that was asked of us, the less we had to say. … We all lived for money, and that is what we died for.”
Anyhow, the sun is about to set and we’ve only made it to Madeira Beach. Let’s put a sleeping bag atop a strip of Tyvek here by the sand-duned public parking lot and go for a swim.
It’s quiet out, save the chugging of the huge generator outside the Speedway across Gulf Boulevard. The stars are brilliant, perhaps because this stretch of barrier island is still without power. I drape my clothes over a piece of rebar in the crumbled wall between parking lot and beach and head for the water, careful not to step on any nails.
It’s a shockingly short walk.
I’ve lived here almost 20 years, but I don’t really love the beach, to be honest. I’d prefer roaming around Big Cypress or the shady Green Swamp over dragging all the requisite stuff into the sand and sitting on a chair in the sun. I’d rather watch a turtle glide along the bottom of the Aucilla River than take in a sunset on the Gulf. I’d much rather swim in gin-clear Homosassa Springs, where I can see my feet, than wade into this big Mississippi-fed red-tide bathtub after dark, naked.
The beach is a little like church in that respect. Sometimes you have to go.
Even so, I have some beach memories that choke me up. My kids loved it. When he was an infant, my bare-bottomed son fell down face-first and came up with a mouthful of sand. We laughed, and he saw us laughing, so he did it again, and again, and now, 15 years later, I’m laughing and crying.
I appreciate the beach. At the same time, I wonder why we even built things out here. Looking toward shore from the shoulder-deep water, it all seems so tenuous and short-sighted. Maybe we should’ve left it to the shorebirds. Jeff Goodell makes that case clear in 2017’s “The Water Will Come.” He says Miami is a “modern-day Atlantis,” and the science backs it up. That city is fucked.
Sea level rise is not a direct threat to human survival, like nuclear war or pandemic. Early humans had no problem adapting to rising seas—they just moved inland. But we modern humans have built so much along the coasts. Houses and offices and restaurants and roads and airports, and that makes us all vulnerable.
And what matters now is not necessarily the amount of rise, but the rate of rise. If water comes slowly, no big deal. It sucks but it’s mostly manageable. But, in the past, the seas have risen in dramatic pulses that coincide with the sudden collapse of ice sheets. “After the end of the last ice age, there is evidence that the water rose about 13 feet in a single century,” Goodell writes.
If that were to happen again, it would be catastrophic. We would be refugees, most of us—millions of us fleeing cities like Tampa and St. Petersburg, leaving behind billions in real estate and infrastructure. Madeira Beach would be the ocean floor. We’d all have to move to Lakeland or something.
Never in the earth’s entire recorded history has there been warming at anything like this speed. By one estimate, it’s about 10 times faster than at any point in the last 60 million years.
We’re getting closer to that nightmare.
Let’s try to sleep now, on our Tyvek mattress. Maybe things will be different in the morning.
“Every minute is an emergency.”
Wake up, friend. Continue this walk for a few more miles, if you would. Blisters are temporary. Let’s make it to the southern tip of Pass-A-Grille so we can look out over the water and toss this rigor mortised seahorse back toward his home at disappearing Egmont Key.
The morning sun brings out the clean-up crews in day-glow vests and work boots. They carry rakes and brooms and speak in Spanish. The sun slides up over a pile of trash outside a hotel on St. Pete Beach and it is topped by a waterlogged coffee-table book featuring upon its cover a contented-looking polar bear. DON’T CAUSE ANOTHER EMERGENCY, flashes a sign in the middle of Gulf Boulevard. Too late, I think.
Every minute is an emergency. Every minute, the average American emits enough carbon to melt enough ice to add five gallons to the oceans, David Wallace-Wells reads in my earbuds.
“If we allow global warming to proceed and to punish us with all the ferocity we have fed it, it is because we have chosen that punishment, collectively walking down a path of suicide,” he says. “If we avert it, it is because we have chosen to walk a different path and endure.”
I am not crying.
We pass the Postcard Inn and the tower with the spinning restaurant on top. We step over all manner of human waste—trash cans and carpets and blankets and five-gallon buckets and the gulls fly overhead and the snowy plovers hustle through Vaseline-colored seafoam.
Some retirement-aged zombies emerge in the dawn, baffled, like we are, at the expanse of the refuse and the stench of marine death on one of America’s best beaches. An American flag flaps in the wind near the rows of giant middens at the south end of Pass-A-Grille as men in hardhats site-survey nearby. I don’t want them to see me throw the seahorse into the water.
It occurs to me that it’ll take no time to clean all this up. I’ve seen it before, every big storm since Katrina. We have the knack and machinery and fuel for getting things back to normal quickly. We have an uncanny ability to forget this shit. I overhear someone saying something about organizing a beach clean-up on Facebook. I wonder if they’ll all drive here. The roads are already open.
It occurs to me, too, that this is the new normal. Another storm brews now. Another will follow. And another.
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Tampa Bay’s Egmont Key is a bellwether for sea level rise in Florida
This article appears in Oct 3-9, 2024.